PC: Korbel Champagne Cellars owner Gary Heck is filing a lawsuit against Consumer Reports for not divulging the judges or method they used to judge their Brut Champagne below that of Gallo's Andre.
8/26/2000: A1-C: Korbel Champagne Cellars owner Gary Heck is filing a lawsuit against Consumer Reports for not divulging the judges or method they used to judge their Brut Champagne below that of Gallo's Andre.

Photo: John Burgess, The Press Democrat

PC: Korbel Champagne Cellars owner Gary Heck is filing a lawsuit...

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Raiya Samii, daughter of the Korbel Champagne Cellars owner Gary Heck sits in her San Francisco Attorney Richard Zitrin offices discussing her fight over millions of dollars of trust fund money that she been denied.

Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle

Raiya Samii, daughter of the Korbel Champagne Cellars owner Gary...

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Raiya Samii works with her prized stallion Jacksun on her rented ranch southeast of Sebastopol Calif. Tuesday August 4, 2009 . Raiya is the daughter of the owner of The Korbel Champagne Cellars, Gary Heck, who she is now involved in a nasty money feud.

Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle

Raiya Samii works with her prized stallion Jacksun on her rented...

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Owner Gary Heck of Korbel Champagne Cellars in Guerneville Calif is in a nasty, money feud with his daughter Raiya Samii July 30, 2009.

San Francisco Attorney Richard Zitrin who represents Raiya Samii, daughter of the Korbel Champagne Cellars owner Gary Heck, discusses her fight over millions of dollars of trust fund money she been denied.

Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle

San Francisco Attorney Richard Zitrin who represents Raiya Samii,...

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Raiya Samii works with her one of her two Zebras on her rented ranch southeast of Sebastopol Calif. Tuesday August 4, 2009. Raiya is the daughter of the owner of The Korbel Champagne Cellars, Gary Heck, who she is now involved in a nasty money feud.

It's all there: The graying scion of a Sonoma County wine empire throwing his daughter off the ancestral grounds. A seamy sex scandal. Vicious legal fighting over multimillion-dollar fortunes. There's even a ritzy horse stable with wild zebras trotting around.

The trouble is, this tale isn't some TV soap opera. It's the real thing - a nasty family battle that has folks all over California's famed Wine Country gossiping but most of all sorry to see yet another winery clan tearing itself up over money.

"It's an ugly story. A very sad story, another example about how family fortunes collide," said author Julia Flynn Siler, whose book "The House of Mondavi" shocked Wine Country in 2007 with its infighting revelations about the Mondavi dynasty.

"Of course, people bicker over small amounts, too. But this one is so twisted."

By most accounts, the bad blood always flowed as darkly as Zinfandel between Gary Heck, the 61-year-old Korbel owner, and his daughter, 39-year-old Richie Ann Samii.

He says she is spoiled, mouthy and doesn't pull her weight. She says he is arrogant, cold and controlling.

Samii's early years, she said, were typical for the daughter of a captain of industry, with vacations in Hawaii or at the family cabin in Lake Tahoe even though her busy dad was rarely around. Heck, through his attorney, said that despite divorcing Samii's mother when Samii was 12, he doted on his daughter and her brother, Aaron, setting up trust funds and doling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for Samii to buy horses, snappy cars and other trimmings of luxury.

"Gary provided a very comfortable lifestyle for Richie Ann. Some people would call it luxurious," said Heck's attorney, Robert O'Brien. Heck declined to speak for this article. "In large part, it was nothing she earned."

Whatever it was, it wasn't enough in Samii's eyes.

"What we always called him was 'that short, fat, bald Nazi alcoholic,' " said Samii, who lived with her mother most of the time after the divorce. "And I guess I'd have to say now I'd just call him a very sad, pathetic man."

A wine empire

Resources never seemed to be a problem at Korbel, one of America's most storied wineries and the 12th largest with $160 million in annual sales.

The company, founded 127 years ago by three Czechoslovakian brothers named Korbel, was bought in 1954 by Heck's father, Adolph. It was already a prominent sparkling wine purveyor then, but after the younger Heck took over in 1974, he pushed sales up from 150,000 cases annually to 1.2 million. He also acquired Kenwood and other boutique, high-quality wineries, boosting Korbel's prestige.

Set alongside the Russian River near Guerneville, the winery's tasting rooms and gourmet deli are popular stops for anyone touring the wine scene in Sonoma County. Its vineyards sweep up like a green carpet from the riverside, and the imposing brick complex sports an ivy-covered tower that looks like an ad for old-world wine craft.

Korbel's sparkling wines themselves are a mixed bag. While sporting some pedigree - the "natural" variety won gold this year at the Tasters Guild International Wine Judging, and Korbel has been served at the past six presidential inaugurations - they generally are known more for the $10 price tag that fetches a perfectly serviceable but none-too-fancy Brut.

Heck, by many accounts, is an equally mixed bag. He owns a jet, a car racing team, a chauffeured limousine and other trappings of wealth, but he is also known for joking around with vine trimmers and tooling around the grounds and nearby Guerneville in a pickup truck. One of the biggest criticisms is that he is too devoted to his company.

"Gary's never been an easy guy to get along with," said Robert Rex, owner of nearby Deerfield Ranch winery, who has known the family for decades. "He's tough - aloof and self-centered and opinioned, a real Type A. But I'll tell you, he works hard."

Heck's daughter is also not one-dimensional. Words such as "spoiled" pop up when her name is mentioned in town, but so do "loyal" and "good-hearted." She's known as a decent barrel horse racer, and even her harshest critics say she is kind to her many animals.

"Richie was always very pleasant, very professional and a decent person," said Chris Willis, who worked for Korbel as a researcher from 1987 to 2004 and now teaches viniculture at Santa Rosa Junior College. "Same goes for Gary, really. He was always open to ideas."

The final straw

The roots of trouble were, apparently, that the roots of the family never separated.

After graduating from a public high school in Guerneville, in 1997 Samii took on the closest thing she's had to a career job: overseeing a 150-acre horse ranch Korbel keeps for pleasure on winery grounds. She shepherded a half-million-dollar upgrade and built the place into a menagerie of 30 horses, dozens of cows, goats and dogs, and two wild zebras.

Then came April 2006, and an explosive sexual incident involving heavy boozing and a messy foursome alongside Korbel's wine bottle-shaped swimming pool.

Two 23-year-old women working in Korbel's delicatessen allege that after a few friendly after-hours beers, Samii and her then-boyfriend, now husband, Chris Samii, sexually assaulted them. Samii said the women have exaggerated what was a casual encounter; regardless, when details hit the wine country gossip circuit, Korbel's management hit the panic button.

The Sonoma County sheriff eventually decided not to file charges after arresting Samii and her then-boyfriend, but the damage to Korbel's reputation was done - and continues, as the two women continue to pursue a civil suit against the couple. Heck fired his daughter from her ranch job in July 2006 and ordered her evicted.

The long-bubbling bad blood between father and daughter went to boil.

Since then, Samii has sued Heck and others in Korbel, alleging they kept her from millions of dollars in a trust fund set up by her grandmother and wrongfully canceled life insurance policies Heck had taken on himself that were supposed to pay her more millions. She also alleges that he has prevented her from getting more than $250,000 in tax refunds involving her trust money.

In five years when she turns 45, she'll get a 5.2 percent ownership interest in Korbel, worth up to $4 million at the moment. But for now, she has no income, she said.

Pretty penny

All told, Samii is trying to get $24 million from her father in court actions that fill more than two dozen thick folders of paperwork at Sonoma County Superior Court. A trial is scheduled to begin Oct. 5.

"They have done everything they can to, in my opinion, impoverish her," said Samii's San Francisco attorney, Richard Zitrin. "She's now so broke she can't pay her cell phone bill."

Gary Heck isn't talking publicly about the spat, but his attorney's court filings weave a tale of unrequited generosity.

When Samii left the ranch, she tore out and took $93,000 worth of fencing, O'Brien said. She blew through $250,000 Heck gave her upon moving out, he said.

She claims he has kept her from much of her trust money, but in fact Heck has given Samii $874,000 since 1989 in trust dividends (an amount Samii says is closer to $372,000), plus a further $650,000 in gifts to her and her children, court filings state.

Regardless of the legal actions, Samii is still due to get at least $3 million in trust money three years after Heck dies, O'Brien said, plus her interest in Korbel in five years. Greed, he said, is driving her lawsuits.

"It seems Richie Ann has become accustomed to her lifestyle, and wants Gary to pay for it," he said. It also appears, he said, "that Richie Ann doesn't want to wait three years after Gary dies to get the money in the irrevocable trust."

In 2007, Heck obtained a three-year restraining order that keeps his daughter from coming within 200 yards of him. That order was granted shortly after Samii posted a cartoon on her MySpace page that showed a cat aiming a gun out a window, saying "Here Gary Gary Gary ... I got you Mutha f-," according to court filings.

The next year Korbel sued Samii for defamation after her e-mail account was used to post Craigslist messages accusing Korbel of punishing employees who complained of sexual harassment and of planning to cut down ancient redwood trees on winery land.

Samii's attorney Zitrin said the cartoon was an "unfortunate joke" posted by Samii's husband, and denies the threats.

"I don't believe anything they say," Zitrin said. "Just read our last brief and count up their lies. It's too many to count."

Gossip is rampant

There are few secrets in Wine Country, and every few years, it seems, a family brouhaha like the Hecks' crops up. Last year it was a fight over money at Napa Valley's Schramsberg sparkling wine empire, and before that it was the Mondavi mess.

"Look, 70 percent of family businesses don't make it from one generation to the next," said author Siler. "An even smaller percentage makes it from the third to the fourth. So this sort of thing happens very regularly in family businesses. There's always a lot of interest in that."

Deerfield Ranch owner Rex put it more simply: "Here in the wine business, we love the drama," he said with a laugh.

Five minutes in any bar in Guerneville confirms the claim.

"I don't see what the big thing is about that ... sex" incident, said a man nursing a beer at Pat's bar one recent evening.

"Gary and Richie Ann are both trouble," said another.

"No, they're both just decent people who got mad at each other," said yet another.

"Look, it's a private matter and it should stay that way," said bar owner Richard Hines, who's known Heck since grammar school and Samii since she was a baby. "People are blowing things all out of proportion. If it was anybody else's daughter, it wouldn't make headlines."

Wishing the talk would die down is like trying to stuff a champagne cork back in the bottle, said Willis, the college teacher.

"It's really sad, and I hope they can patch things up," he said. "They all have money. Why blow it? Just shows you that money doesn't buy happiness."

Broke and hoping

For now, Samii and her husband live on borrowed money at a rented ranch several miles from Korbel's spread. They were able to bring 12 horses with them, the zebra pair and several dogs. Chris Samii said he is a building contractor, but has been unable to find work. They live week to week, they said.

Samii still competes in barrel racing but for now, she sees no way to start a new career.

"At this point, I just want what he (Heck) owes me, what Korbel owes me," she said. "Ultimately, I'd like him removed from my life and my family.

"If there was legally any way to have him removed as my father, I'd like that. It's a burden to know he's the man who biologically made me."

Heck's attorney said the whole blowup boils down, basically, to a spoiled child unwilling to earn her own keep.

"Eventually she (Samii) will be a multimillionaire," O'Brien said, "but it appears from her court filings she doesn't like the 'eventually' part of it."